The house at 417 Trevor Ct. has been sold. Congratulations to the new owners.
To close out our postings on the subject, here’s some pics of the completed project.
We’ll be starting a new project at 412 Trevor Ct. shortly. Be on the lookout for some preliminary information soon.
We’ll be having open house at our new home at 417 Trevor Court from 3 to 5 PM on Sunday, 2/26/06.
View a map here.
I don’t think I’ve taken the time to actually summarise what we’ve got available at 417 Trevor Ct.
Bedrooms: 3
Baths: 2
Square feet: 1600
Price: $164,000.00
Also included are a 2 car garage and a large cedar deck. See more information about the house at the page I have set up specifically for it.
As an experiment I think I’m going to start posting daily updates about the progress of our jobs. Not only will it keep the site fresh, I hope to impart information and advice that users will find helpful in their own projects.
It’s been awhile since I made an update. Progress has been kinda slow, but is now picking up. The house now has the vinyl siding 95% complete. The interior of the house has been insulated, drywalled, taped, and painted. This week I’ve been working on getting the trim work done. As with all things trim work is a trade-off. We decided to not take the shortcut that is often taken on new homes today of wrapping the windows with drywall, instead of trimming them out. This adds a very classy look to the interior of a home. The trade-off is that finish carpentry takes a lot longer.
You have to rip a bunch of 1-by material to the right width to go from the interior surface of the windows to the interior surface of the walls. Then you have to plane the material to take out the ragged sawed edge. Next you have to prime/paint all six sides of each piece. Finally, just before installation, you screw the top and side jamb extensions together and then screw the windowsill to those. Now you can install the assembly in the openings. After you have shimmed the openings to square, you nail the assembly in place and run casing trim around the window to dress it up and hide the crack between the drywall and the window you just installed. You can spend a lot of time on a house doing just the window trim.
We also got started on the Kempas (a Brazilian hardwood) wood floors today and made some decent progress. Hoping to have it all done by the end of Monday. This wood flooring offers a beautiful color that varies by a good bit from board to board giving the floor a beautiful varigated color.
In addition to these items McDowell Electric was there today finishing up the electric work. All of our lights, switches, and receptacles are now installed giving the place a finished look…
I’ll update this post tomorrow with some pics of the progress we’ve made.
Water is the number one thing to cause building systems to fail, yet few builders pay enough attention to managing the water that either forms upon, or falls upon your home.
Vinyl siding is a popular exterior wall finish in our area. Installed correctly it can look good at a reasonable price. However, vinyl siding is not a water barrier! It will slow water down, but H2O has little problems getting behind vinyl siding. This makes house wrap important.
House wrap serves dual purposes. For one thing it helps control air-infilitration, which makes your house more comfortable. Many builders don’t realize that it is also an excellent water barrier. Because of the way it is constructed, products like Tyvek will prevent drafts, while at the same time allowing wet lumber (which will inevitably happen) to breathe. It also prevents wind-driven water from penetrating through to the lumber. Many builders, either through lack of education, or for cost-saving measures, don’t apply house wrap to the gables of a house. Their reasoning is that there’s no reason to prevent air-infiltration through the attic, since you try to ventilate attic spaces very well. This totally discounts the water-blocking properties of house wrap and allows water to directly saturate the building under the vinyl siding.
Note our measures to control water on our buildings:
1. House wrap applied to all gables.
The follwing picture shows the job at 417 Trevor Ct under construction with housewrap applied to the gables:
2. Decks flashed to ensure proper water flow
Following are two pictures showing how we flash where decks attach to the home ensuring that water travels down the housewrap and over, instead of behind the deck structure. Notice also the bituthene (the black stuff) applied to the wall behind where the deck is attached to the building. This product helps seal around the holes formed by the bolts used to attach the deck to the building.
3. Properly flashed windows and doors
This is yet another area where your typical builder fails to protect the home. By applying housewrap to a building you are providing a plane for water to run down the house. If you then install windows and doors through this plane the water will go behind these obstacles into the walls. Typically, the builder applies the housewrap to the walls while the walls are lying on the floor. He will then make cuts in the housewrap and wrap it into any openings in the wall. After the walls are stood up, doors and windows are inserted into the wall. This is where most guys stop. However, for the housewrap to do any good, you have to then apply additional flashing around doors and windows.
Note again how in the second image we paid attention to the flow of water. The felt paper at the top of the window is inserted behind the housewrap above it. This ensures water does not penetrate the structure.
With loan commitment from New Era Bank, we’ve begun our latest project at 417 Trevor Ct in Bonne Terre, MO.
I wanted to begin discussing this project by highlighting the footing forms system we’re using. But first some background on conventional footing systems.
Conventionally (at least in our area) footings formed up with two rows of 2×10 lumber outlining the perimiter of the house which are then filled in with concrete. Typically you’ll spend part of one day setting up the footing forms, part of another day pouring the concrete into the forms, and then part of yet another day removing the forms. Next you’ll form up the foundation walls (we’ll talk about this step in another post). After that, you’ll lay perforated pipe around the entire perimeter of the foundation on the ground next to the footing and cover it with gravel and either filter fabric or straw to filter out dirt particles and allow water to flow into the perforated pipe and then out to daylight.
The footing forming system we’re using eliminates some steps and guarantees a higher quality job. It’s called Form-A-Drain and it makes for a better job. A problem with traditional foundation drainage is that on the jobsite it’s very hard to ensure that the pipe remains level all around the foundation. Jobsites are rough places to be and ensuring that the pipe is level down in the trenches is difficult. FAD ensures a perfectly level drainage system all around. Another quality advantage is ensured by the straps that hold the two sides of the footing forms apart. The straps are engineered with a “U” shape that dips down into the footing. You can lay your courses of steel rebar reinforement on these straps and are again ensured perfect placement in the footing. Additionally, the forms install quickly.
Since this is the first time I’ve used this product we started out slow learning the system, but once we got going on the project and learned the ropes we could just fly around installing these…while at the same time ensuring a higher quality product.
This is our latest house design. It’s currently under construction at 417 Trevor Court in Bonne Terre, MO with completion scheduled for an October time frame.
(click for large size)
As I’ve noted before I’m trying to get away from the typical design seen on a ranch in our area. To that end, when I started designing this layout I kept a couple things in mind:
All else flowed from these ideas. Now, let’s begin a more detailed look at the floorplan.
To start out, I almost always use “room boxes” like this:
As I lay out the room boxes I keep in mind different rules of thumb that I’ve learned are important such as good minimum sizes for a garage, bathroom sizes, bedroom sizes, bedroom locations, and dining room table sizes. Instead of taking the easy route and just laying the rooms out end-to-end I spend some time figuring out how to locate the rooms in a compact manner so that I end up with a more-or-less square layout, in the end my work coalesced into the above.
Now, the software I use for plan design can take my room boxes and generate a floorplan from them. I then do lots of fine-tuning to get things arranged and positioned as I wish. When I finished I ended up with a house of around 1300 square feet. Where I’m building this house currently has a minimum square footage requirement of 1500 so I did some tweaking to up the size and ended up with this:
(click for large size)
Now, let’s focus on a few areas that I fine-tuned to give the home more character.
Notice how on the right side of the house I extended the bedroom, bathroom, and laundry beyond the basic footprint of the house. This wasn’t done for space considerations. Originally the plan had the same rooms constrained to the basic square shape of the foundation. The reason for the bumpout is to add character to the home. Without the bumpout that side of the house from the exterior would just be a large expanse of vinyl siding with little interrupting it. Now it will look something like this:
Some additional nice features of this home include: